Well before Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint turned the special predicament of the American Jew into a long psychiatric joke, Friedman told the original story and got the first laugh. Stern is the story of a Jewish family displaced from the city to the suburbs, and more particularly, of the mild-mannered Every'man of the title, under siege in his new home, set upon by voracious caterpillars as well as shades of bigotry that range from the genteel...